Prince Metternich, the architect of the Holy Alliance against France, is supposed to have said after hearing news of the death of his arch-rival, the devious French diplomat Talleyrand, “I wonder what he meant by that?” Metternich (if he really said it) mean it as a joke. The State Department will ask what Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meant by his outburst yesterday that Zionism is “a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan, after all, has “bonds of trust” with Barack Obama. Last year Obama told Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine that the “friendships and the bonds of trust” that he forged with Erdogan (whom he named among five foreign leaders) is “precisely, or is a big part of, what has allowed us to execute effective diplomacy.” What could the president’s friend have meant by that? Erdogan said exactly what he believes. The Turkish leader is a holdover from the enchanted world of rural Anatolia, in which Jewish conspiracies swirl in the night air along with jinn and witches. That is not an exaggeration, but an objective report, as I will explain below. No-one should be surprised. Lunatics have run better countries than Turkey in living memory.

There is bizarre edge to Tayyip Erdogan. He is given to lurid, sometimes bloodthirsty outbursts. During a February 2008 visit to Germany, Turkey’s most important European trading partner, Erdogan scandalized his hosts when he told an audience of 20,000 Turks that assimilation into German culture was “a crime against humanity.” Germany, after all, knows a thing or two about crimes against humanity. German opinion was outraged, and Turkey’s chances for membership in the European Community—a pillar of Turkish diplomacy for a generation—fell to negligible. Erdogan ignored the uproar, and told the Turkish Parliament upon his return to Ankara, “I repeat… assimilation is a crime against humanity . . . . We can think differently from (Chancellor Angela) Merkel about this, but that is my opinion.” The German attitude towards its Turkish minority has swung from multicultural outreach to pessimism about their future in German society. In October 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a gathering of her political party that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society has “utterly failed.” As press reports paraphrased her remarks, “Allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating has not worked in a country that is home to some four million Muslims.”

We obtain some insight into Erdogan’s warped view of the world by considering the leading ideologue of Turkish Islamism, Fethullah Gulen. I profiled him in a September 2010 Asia Times essay. He presides over a business empire worth tens of billions of dollars and a system of Islamist schools that stretches from Central Asia to charter schools in the United States. The Gulen organization took control of Turkey by infiltrating its security services in a patient march through the institutions over the past two decades. Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life.”

Canadian cable tv airs any number of utterly ludicrous programs about UFOs, Conspiracy theories, haunted houses, etc. One such channel is our so-called History channel! It airs utter junk (if one is an ignoramus, an illiterate and believes in jinns and magic -- well, that's tragic -- but if one advances, under a guise of so-called skepticism (as if one were a legitimate "researcher") an utterly bogus thesis -- this is FRAUD. It is designed so as to deceive the viewer. And yet this is what appears on television. I think Carl Sagon and Martin Gardner would be rolling in their graves to discover how the West, itself (never mind the idiocy of Islam), is destroying the very foundations of modernity. Btw, Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" (1997) is available in PDF for free. (Another excellent text against pseudoscience is Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (1952). Gardner included an entire chapter on Scientology -- still an excellent source).

Neither Martin Gardner nor Carl Sagan were atheists. Sagan was an agnostic. I don't believe science and religion are incompatible. (I thoroughly dislike the popular cult of atheists -- I believe they harm not only religion but science as well. They do damage to both subjects. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould, IMO, offered some of wisest observations about science and religion.)

This just shows me that Obama is incapable of differentiating between good and evil; between friends and enemies and between those who support the U.S. and those who wish to destroy the U.S. This is what we get when we have the first Affirmative Action President; a man who has been given a free ride most of his life. Is it any wonder that his college transcripts are hidden? Is it any wonder that aside from his ghost written books there is not one single article that has his name on it? Barry is a sham, a liar and a thief; he stole the minds of half the country who voted for him.

There's a sit-com here: "I Dream of Djinn-Djinn. A clown at a run down circus in Anatolia finds a bottle with a beautiful magic woman from old Samarkand and becomes prime minister by wishing it. Starring Burcu Gunes. I'd watch it just for her - with the sound off.

I wonder if Erdogan noticed the contradiction between his two examples of "crimes against humanity". Turkish assimilation into other cultures is a crime, he says. Presumably Jewish assimilation into other cultures would be a crime , too. Israel exists so that Jews do not have to assimilate elsewhere, which of course they were, and are, not always permitted to do. But the existence of Israel (Zionism) is, for Erdogan, a crime. The implication of Erdogan's logic is that Jews should not be permitted to live anywhere.

I wonder for how long Obama is going to consider this new Hitler a friend.